NT 4.0 ??

[Guest]

WaaaaaSup!! .Just breakin the ice!

Anyways...
I have a Mobo Soyo 5eHm, AMD k6 2/500 CPU..
PC100 64 MB Ram, RagePro 128 AGP Adapter....
2 MAxtor HD's 3 gig each...on the first drive i have
win98se...and i want to dual-boot my machine with NT 4.0
but it does not allow me to install on the empty second drive..error "setup unable to continue" and something about unable to create bootstrap "....need help.. i've done this various times and i never had a problem before......

thanx crew..

 

[Lucol]

WAAAZZZUUUUPPPPPPP!!!!
Anyhow, if your 1st drive is formated using FAT32, this is likely your problem. WinNT 4.0 can't dual boot of a FAT32 drive, even though though the OS files are going to be on a different drive. I'm not sure if there are any boot manager apps that can do it, but NT by itself cannot.

 

[Guest]

i have read that fat32 or fat itself cannot see ntfs but i dont see why ntfs is unable to support it..fat32 allocated disk space better that fat or fat16...win98se on my machine runs smoothe using fat32..i would hate to run it with fat16..and dual boot with NT 4.0...i guess i will make an ms-dos partition and just have NT 4.0 and kill 98se...i also read that system commander 2000 will enable me to multi-boot a variety of O/S's but will it still allow me to have 98se with fat32 in one drive and NT 4.0 in the 2nd using system commander's own MBR?....... any thoughts lucol?

thanx..

 

[Lucol]

I couldn't tell you the exact reason why NT can't dual boot off of a FAT32 drive, but it just can't do it by itself. I have tried any 3rd party boot managers, so I really wouldn't know if they support this setup or not, they probably do, otherwise what would be the point of them existing, so you might want to try one out. Since I have no experience with them, I couldn't recommend any particular one. And yes, it would be pretty crappy to have to go to FAT16 just to have NT and 98 dual booting, but with NT's own boot manager, it's the only way to do it.

 

[Guest]

Well...
i guess this is the ugly that comes with the beauty with computers..lucol...i appreciate your wisdom....i guess i'll wait for windowsXP to come out at the end of this and see how that goes..but for now....let the force be with you...

wassssssuupppp...

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

O.K, if you can start over then try this. If you've already got Win98 on your machine & you don't have a DOS boot disk but only the win98 boot disk, go into the Windows\command directory & copy format.com to your floppy. On the first drive, use fdisk to create a small (about 200MB) partition. This will be your C: (BOOT) partition where ONLY BOOT FILES are loaded! Format C:, this will be automatically FAT16 due to its small size. Create (using fdisk) your D: partition & any more you might want on this physical drive. Now when it comes time to install WIN98, you DO NOT install it to the default C:\WINDOWS directory!!! You instead choose D:\WINDOWS. Windows will install on your D: drive & will automatically place any needed boot/system files on your C: partition (which is FAT16 remember). The WIN98 CD will also format any logical drives (in FAT32) for you. I recommend only usin the video card & no other adapters during install. Once WIN98 is on your D: drive, install the adapters (one at a time) with latest drivers & also get all the Windows Updates from Micrsoft's site. Win98 should be running with all hardware/software/critical updates before you install NT4.0.
There is a few different ways you can go about installing NT on your second physical drive. I would create a small (say, 500 MB?) partition where you would install NT to, finish the install & use NT's built in "Disk Administrator" to create (& format to either NTFS or FAT) any logical drives you may want. NT will place any boot files it needs on your C: partition on the FIRST physical drive. If you get an error during NT install about "..long file names...", then use the "lock" command from the A:\ prompt to quickly fix it.
If anyone has seen any errors, please correct me. It has been a looong time since I've done this.
Feel free to email me if ya got any problems or questions!

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Regarding my original post. I wanted to make it clear to NOT make the WIN98/WINNT boot partition larger than 512 MB, as your WIN98 boot floppy will make it FAT32 = problems!

 

[Lucol]

You could always dual boot Win2K and W98, but with 64Mb or RAM, you won't like it at all (Win2K that is). The other post is correct, you could create a small primary FAT16 partition, but it really doesn't have to be that large, you could make it like 5Mb, and have nothing on it but your system files for NT and 98 (not the OS files, just the system files needed to boot ie. MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, BOOT.INI...etc). So, you could have on your 1st hard drive, 1 5Mb FAT 16 partition as C:, 1 2.95Gb NTFS partition as E🙁leave this unpartitioned so that you can later create it with the instalation of NT). Your second drive could be 1 3Gb FAT32 partition as D:. Since the primary partitions for each drive take dominance, this is the reason why it seems strange that the 2nd partition of your primary drive would be drive D:. So, you partition everything from the getgo(this way the drive letters don't get reassigned later on), install Win98 on drive D:, which is actually your second drive, then inside of Win98, you install NT to your E: drive, which is the 2nd partition on your 1st drive and bingo, you can now dual boot NT and 98 and still have 98 with FAT32. Or you can wait for WindowsXP, but then you'll probably need a nice upgrade for your computer, because if it's anything like Win2K, it'll be very, very slow with 64Mb or RAM.

 

[Guest]

this is some great insight...now its clear...makes sense..
thank you
RON-JEREMY AND LUCOL,..
superior minds...of tomshardware..